I was bitten by a tick when I was ten. It’s the only tick bite I remember, though a large number of those with Lyme don’t remember a tick bite. There’s no way to know if this bite or another was the culprit. I do remember a rash on my hand the summer I was pregnant, and I now wonder if it was from a tick, but there is no way to know. I always had weird medical things happen as a kid though, so we have wondered if maybe it’s been dormant for many years. Your immune system has an amazing ability to keep things in check (even if you’ve been given a taste of that forbidden formula).
And your immune system is amazingly susceptible to stress, which arrived on my, well, ashy, crumbling doorstep when I was eight months pregnant.
I had Kellen and went into my six week checkup, where they did a pap, which came back abnormal (yeah, my fall pretty much sucked), and gave me a flu shot.
Four days later (and four days after returning to teaching) my face stopped working. I was home nursing Kellen (or trying) and tried to smile at him, at which point I realized I couldn’t move the right side of my mouth. Earlier in the day I had noticed that it felt like I was talking with braces on, like my lips were having to make way for an obstruction on my teeth, despite not having had braces in well over a decade. That morning I drank orange juice that tasted dull as well as had a Starbucks sandwich that made me question their place as a food establishment.
It turned out that my taste buds were not working on the right side. After I finished nursing Kellen I decided to go back to school to finish teaching. I was really scared but didn’t want to deal with it at the moment (because the only two options I could think of were a stroke and brain cancer). As I was driving down the road I lost my ability to blink my right eye. I turned around, and we went to the hospital.
The good news is that it wasn’t a stroke or brain cancer, though the way the doctor told me it was *just* Bell’s Palsy made it seem so benign as though I hadn’t just lost full functionality of one side of my face and now looked like this:
“Are you sure nothing else is wrong?” I asked the ER doc. I just couldn’t fathom that the nerves in my face would stop firing just because they felt like it. The doctor assured me that nearly all cases of Bell’s Palsy are spontaneous and have no other underlying cause than a small virus. (Had I lived in the Northeast, it is likely I would have been tested for Lyme then as Bell’s Palsy is common in Lyme and the first symptom of it moving into your brain, when things get really dicey.) They gave me anti-virals and steroids. (It was because of this I stopped breastfeeding.)
Dan and I decided to head down to San Diego. I had taken a leave of absence from work because I was overwhelmed. The stress of the fire and the rebuild was compounded by this new development, and I knew that I was spread too thin. It has always been hard for me to walk away, and while it was sad, I am proud of my ability to say, “I can’t.” We left the day after Thanksgiving, a trip that was nearly thwarted by an incredible and overwhelming sense of anxiety. I couldn’t sit down at all because I felt so antsy and uncomfortable. It was one of the only times I’ve ever had the urge to scrub a floor. It’s unknown if this was a natural progression of the Lyme or because I had been prescribed Zoloft to deal with the PTSD. It’s been posited that SSRIs may actually exacerbate Lyme symptoms in some people (many also find them helpful).
That was also the day that the dizziness set in, and it’s kept a firm hold on me for over a year. I spent the entire trip in San Diego sleeping. When I wasn’t, I was scared. I truly thought I was going to die but was afraid of going to the ER because I didn’t want them to think I was crazy. I wish I had gone while in California.
I made a deal with myself that I would make an appointment with my neurologist in January if I was still sick after Christmas. I scheduled an appointment. That week I woke up and felt fine, nearly canceling the appointment to see the doctor. At that point being dizzy was the biggest issue; it was debilitating and frightening. The symptoms came back strongly the day before I went to see the doctor It would be the first of many cycles but also the clue that led another doctor to Lyme disease nine months later.
At first I was diagnosed with Benign Positional Vertigo, which is caused by ear crystals shaking loose. The test for this is tilting your head back to see if it gets worse. It did. But the exercises didn’t work. So an MRI was ordered. While I passed the muscle tests with the neurologist and chiropractor I was seeing, I drop things a lot (more than normal), so I worried a lot about MS, especially because I was told that mid to late 20s was typical for age of onset. With every click on the MRI machine I just hoped that I didn’t have MS and if I did that the test showed it. I didn’t want to be sick, but I also wanted an answer to why I felt so badly.
One year ago, September 8, you kissed me. You think it was so innocent. Just a momentary lapse of judgement. I wish I could tell you this. You have no idea the damage you caused.
I was content in my marriage, content with my life. I love my husband (I guess), but we never had any sexual chemistry between us and we haven’t had sex in years. He said it was because I was frigid, and I thought I was because I never felt any attraction to him. Over the years he has lost all desire for me, but still, he is a good man and we have built a comfortable life. He’s a reclusive intellectual and a bit depressed, like I am, so we spend a lot of time in silence. he silence, like the sexless marriage, has become unbearable.
Then YOU came along… you are fun, energetic, full of life and we talk and joke constantly when we have lunch or a drink. You remind me of everything I gave up when I got married, including spontaneity, humor, fun, and passion. I am not frigid; that one kiss proved it. The arousal and feeling of pure joy in that one kiss are indescribable and it still haunts me every day. I was not expecting this, not looking for this, yet it happened.
When I see you with your partner I get so jealous. Her laughter is a knife in my soul. I don’t laugh with my husband, we don’t have fun. I laugh with you though, and whenever we part, I go into a deep depression for days afterwards at the thought of not seeing you again for a while.
I feel you would never leave your partner for me – it’s far too much a miracle to expect from Life. And I’ve never, ever wanted to cheat on or leave my husband. So what am I to do? I feel like I’m dying a slow death from a neglect that I never realized was happening until you kissed me.
I have no valid reason for leaving my husband, he’s a good person and he tries. I feel like I’m the one who’s screwed everything up, that he should have married someone who could love and appreciate him better and was attracted to him. He says he loves me though and if I leave ever him he’ll be crushed. It’s cowardly of me, but I wish instead he would find someone better than me and leave me for her so I could try again in life. I would want to try with you, but as I said, it’s far too big a miracle to expect and probably more than I deserve.
My therapist hasn’t told me to stop seeing you, and for that I am grateful. He understands you are the only bright spot in my life, even though it depresses me so whenever we part. He acknowledges my feelings and agrees this is all so tragic, but so far we have no answers. This is all such a mess.
Untreated depression leads to chronic depersonalization” would be a meaningful statement if you meant something, but you mean nothing.
You are not a hardy child of Appalachia; stop wasting your days listening to bluegrass playlists, pining for a time that will never exist. You are weak. People wade through hells far deeper than this one, the soles of their feet scorched but their ankles held intact. But your tendons are peeling like the stalk of a pineapple, the skin on your knee burnt off to display brittle bone, graham cracker bone, bone of yarn, bone of string cheese.
Stay inside where neighbors cannot see the grotesque state of your legs. Stay inside where you cannot chant for them: gooble-gobble, one of us.
Do you want to know what a real person looks like? Don’t skip class this week. Arrive late and sit in one of the satellite desks. Never learn what Marx said. Observe the others mid-digestion and covet their hairlines, their builds. Sketch a series of concentric circles and keep your head down, because you are not a scholar, you are a machine, you are an alarm clock, you are a Disney Channel original series, you are just a paideia, you are mendacity itself. Masturbate for me; you deserve the shame of an amputee juggler on a unicycle, you deserve the shame of a hapless fourteen-year-old YouTube celebrity. Look around you and tell me if any of the people you see had to order their bootstraps off the Silk Road. Every waste of Bitcoins is melancholy, o destitute child, they don’t weave bootstraps in your size.
What you are going to need is a course of Paxil. It is a medication that, by the miracle of contemporary science, will make it easier for you to be worthless. You will be glad to have taken it, as it will make you scream less and sleep more. It will take your ragged canyon and level it out into mesa, and then it will take your mesa and build a timeshare resort. Paxil is an electric fence between banality and suicidality. Paxil is the opposite of filthy, passionate fucking. The instructions on the back of the bottle tell you to stream amateur porn and look at the way they want each other, then take down two pills with a light snack. You are going to forget, but don’t forget: you have to be beautiful to be hired as a caricature artist at the renaissance fair. Don’t forget, you have to do your laundry more often than you do now.
Maybe it’s not common, maybe it’s commonly forgotten, maybe I’ll feel too ashamed to even post this, but pregnancy isn’t what I expected.
Now don’t get me wrong, I KNEW what to expect, the nausea and fatigue, the moodiness and what not, but I wasn’t prepared.
I wasn’t prepared to shy away from my friends and family, to want nothing but my bed and books. I guess I’m still kinda me, but I am a me I haven’t been for a long time, a me I thought I grew out of. It’s not that I’m not happy, because I couldn’t feel more love for this child or for my husband that I do now, it’s just that I am also sad. I am tired and sick and rather than get better as I get closer to my second trimester it’s gotten worse.
Am I going to be like my mom? 40 weeks of throwing up just because the wind blew in my face? Dear God, I hope not.
The worst part is that I can’t see the end of this. I’m not miserable mentally, but physically I am and it’s draining the reserves I have in my brain to separate my logic and my emotions.
Part of it is that I am, frankly, a little tired of worrying about everyone’s opinions, preparing myself for arguments before they have the chance to arise. It’s to the point I don’t even want to talk to anyone about babies, birth, shots, slings, ANYTHING.
Unfortunately, I care what people think, and caring what they think but knowing that I am going to do what I think is best in the end, causes me to take things personally and feel a lot of unnecessary anger. Anger makes me tired.
It’ll pass and in a few weeks I’ll be laughing at this post, calling myself dramatic and eating 14 cinnamon rolls because that’s my new favorite pastime. At least, I fucking hope so.
Until then, this is me being honest, and begging you not to say “I told you so.”
My ex husband killed himself two months ago, and I’m not coping.
He has left behind a four year old daughter, and as we are still married, I am his next of kin.
I left him 18 months ago, he seemed happy and he seemed to get on with his life.
Since leaving him, I have been dating someone new.
I found my ex hanging from his loft. Since then, he is almost all I can think about.
My partner has been great, amazing, incredible, but I really cannot shake a feeling of guilt, and sadness, wondering why he did it, and how if I hadn’t left him, he would still be alive.
It’s breaking my heart, and it’s breaking my soul. Every time I feel strong again, the slightest thing sends me right back to square one. I saw him hours before he died. Why didn’t I notice any signs or see anything wrong? He seemed happy and normal and himself.
I am so cross with him. How could he do this to our baby? How could he not see that she adores him and hangs off his every word?
He will never know how many regrets I have. He will never know he is so missed. I don’t know how to rebuild my life, as a 20-something widow, single mum of a grieving four year old.
you have threatened to kill me and it seems every time we talk you spew out nothing but lies.
I failed you. As the person who brought you into this world, it was my convoluted job to make you appropriate for society.
If you had been an only child, would it have been different? If you had been an only child, would I have given you more leeway so I did not sacrifice your siblings humiliation, safety and discontent?
We moved for you. It was the area, the neighborhood, the school, the doctors. I did everything and gave all in hope that the problem wasn’t really you.
Doctors, therapists, counselors, hospitals; things a mother should never have to say about her child, I said.
In the end, I failed you.
For many years, I was a mighty warrior set out to ensure your health and happiness, but you broke my spirit and I gave up. I want so badly to let you in, but the price is so high and I am emotionally bankrupt.
You deserved a stronger mother, one who could stay in the fight, one who could be more understanding, one who could battle for more than 19 years. I am so sorry you ended up with me, who tried to make you fit in a cookie-cutter mold. I still have no clue what kind of mom could have helped you.
It wasn’t me.
I battled uphill to mend my broken life while trying to protect yours. The spiraling, all-consuming, soul-sucking, constantly being kicked and punched, that was all beyond me.
I’m sorry I am so broken and weak that I can’t afford to be hurt again. Everyone in your world has disconnected over the years in the simple and often subconscious act of self-preservation. But in everyone’s life, there should be at least one constant, one person you know will always be there. You don’t even have that.
I hurt you.
I insulted you.
I embarrassed you.
I punished you.
I hospitalized you.
I let you down.
I lied to you.
I threatened you.
I had you arrested.
I closed my door to you.
I laughed at you.
I walked away….
I didn’t ever deserve you, and you certainly didn’t deserve me.
